The swimmer (Short story)
When Robert came to the pool, it wasn't hot yet. The solar disk just showed up and its red patches of light, as if drawn on the surface of the ocean, ran from the horizon to the shore. Avoiding the heat was not the reason for an early swim. Robert preferred to finish his morning work out before the guard arrival at 8 a.m.
The pool was 11 feet deep at one end and fell under the city ordinance, requiring having either a full-time lifeguard on duty or a floating guard rope crossing the pool in the middle.
That was supposed to prevent children from swimming at the deep end, while in reality only prevented the lappers from normal swimming, as they have to change their stroke at this obstacle diving underneath it.
Certainly, one could have gone to a public pool. It was even longer; 50 yards instead of 30 and had swimming tracks. But hey, the public is public. Often the wind blew fallen leaves in the water or some other gross stuff could occur. One could never be sure what all the cute kids were doing there when in the middle of fun they didn't have the time to run to the toilet.
The main advantage of the condo pool was, of course, its cleanness and proximity. Every day early in the morning, a security guard scooped leaves or any other unwanted objects. The administration also maintained it at a constant temperature during the cold months and Robert could swim all the years around. And, of course, it was as close as getting out of the building. With Robert’s knee that he messed up playing basketball, which made him walk slowly, this offered a huge time-saving.
As the proof of water cleanness, some blackbirds similar to rook or starling, standing at the edge of the pool, drank water from it. Robert put on a hat, glasses, took a few steps to the edge of the pool, and jumped into the water. The swimming attributes that Robert wore were top of the line. "Greedy pays twice" and Robert always invested into first-class equipment. His gargles were stuffed with electronics, allowing him not only to monitor his speed, distance, the number of strokes and his pulse but also the performance of other swimmers around the world using similar technology and even to compete against them.
Most of the distance he swam using freestyle and only at the very end of the workout did several loops using "fly." First twelve yards Robert swam under the water using dolphin kick. Then, once floating to the surface, he did long sliding movements with his hands adding four leg kicks with every hand pull. Once approaching the opposing end of the pool he made a flip turn, from which he followed with the dolphin kick again.
Water had a peculiar effect on Jake’s mental process. He didn’t think about anything in particular and yet all his regular undirected thoughts about his life in general compressed into one flat blob swam along with him hanging like start dust about his mental focal point.
As a child, Robert was an aloof child with strongly pronounced predilections and even stronger conspicuous antipathies. He studied well, but was indifferent to school, and did just enough to get an A. He loved computer games and invested so much patience, persistence, and ingenuity in that activity that always reached the last level and beat the game. Often he reached such a level of concentration that for him all external phenomena disappeared, and he found himself entirely in the narrow corridor of his laser beam-directed imagination. Something matured in his soul, something huge and important, but something he could not yet realize with his immature intellect. Disturbed at such moments even by his sister, Robert was greatly annoyed, rudely repulsed her, and shouted, “stop bothering me with your foolishness!” Even though, when she once spent the time in the summer camp he missed her asking these “stupid questions.”
Robert grew up in not a well off family, understood it at a very young age, and, unlike his younger sister and even younger brother, never asked his parents for anything. Even when he was being mocked because he came to school wearing the same washed-out jersey. From an early age, he realized that he had no one to count on besides himself. He hated his family's financial hardships and imagined how he would pull everyone out of that financial swamp.
Back in high school, he found a job and bought a used car with the money. Then there was college, a series of jobs in different companies. But there was no satisfaction. He hated the corporate atmosphere, intrigues, and pettiness of what went on. Moreover, he realized that it would take him years to get to a management position, and even then, the money he’d make there wouldn’t satisfy him.
So, he went into business on his own.
This wasn’t easy.
He had to swim in the dirty waters of the Internet trying to make a buck along with the other shoal of minnows. Often he stood at the end of an abyss as the money he accumulated was depleted even to cover his rent and food. At the same time, during these stressful and desperate moments, especially when he had nothing to eat all day, his mind turned on extra revolutions and a new idea came to him in the flash.
There were many ideas, but Robert had an interesting ability to calculate the possibilities of implementing the idea accurately, in terms of the available financial and intellectual resources, and the opportunities to advertise the service. He cast many of the ideas away, as impossible to implement by one or another reason.
Eventually, he found a niche all of his own. That was a service to minnows like him, especially for those in remote countries. Six long years took him to build this service from scratch. Robert nurtured the idea, hired high qualification programmers, reliable service techs all around the Globe, and learned the tricks of Google and Yahoo search engine optimizations. Finally, his service worked like a clock without his participation, well almost without.
He still had to deal with returns and unhappy or pretending to be customers. Still, the high quality of his service attracted many clients from all over the World and it wasn’t just minnows, but a few dolphins among them and even a couple of wales. Robert started to make decent money. It was more than the upper management position pays in an average company.
This wasn't ultimately what he wanted. This was only the first step towards it. He was fed up with a slow uphill crawl and wanted to solve his financial problem in one powerful swipe. At first, however, he decided to purchase himself a permanent accommodation. In principle, with the type of business that he had, Robert didn't care where to live. He often moved from state to state, lived in hotels, or rented apartments from six months to a year. But there was a severe decline in the real estate market and it was stupid not to take advantage of it. He bought himself a one-bedroom apartment, in a high-rise building by the ocean much below its actual value. Robert paid cash. He didn't like lenders to snoop into his finances. The main consideration of this purchase was the year-round pool. The room had a bed, a table on which he could place a laptop, and the kitchen where he cooked natural food - that's all he needed for now.
He didn't bring women here and preferred to invite them to hotels. Yes, women. He met them through online dating sites and at times had an affair with hotel clerks. His price on the meat market wasn’t so bad. Robert was tall by common standards (by basketball standards he was only tall enough for a point guard). Constant swimming developed his body - broadening shoulders, and flattening the stomach. Still, he didn't have the huge muscles of a bodybuilder, and while in clothes seemed slim.
He wasn’t stingy but didn’t stretch himself to court high maintenance women. Some women considered the look of large olive eyes mysterious and impenetrable and were intrigued by them.
Once in a while, he had affairs, but they didn’t last. Some women annoyed him with their demands and he left them. Others left him dissatisfied with the lack of emotional availability, with him working all day long and not allowing them even to redecorate his apartment. At times, he even went for housekeepers, those that were looking supple and curvy. No matter if, they knew very little English. The conversation was not exactly what he wanted from them.
His family considered his financial situation stable enough to settle down. But for Robert, this wasn’t enough. He wanted much more money and so that he could make his family financially independent and then, having been resolving this issue, to search the one with whom he would have a perfect relationship.
He invested 300 k in shares of the gold mining company, almost half of his liquid capital.
And… lost it.
Well, not all of it as he eventually got out. That was a heavy blow. Several days Robert lay motionless in bed, looking at the ceiling and contemplating what has happened. He wanted to scream and break furniture. But he couldn’t afford to do any of this. He was a leader of his family. Everyone had financial difficulties – his sister and younger brother, his parents. Robert partially supported them and couldn't just abandon them now, when he was down. The family was his home base, the place of the emotional firmament. Through his family, he felt a connection with all the generation of his ancestors that lived, struggled, and thought of a better life just so he could appear in this world. He wanted to make enough for all of them, plus for future generations. To achieve this, he had to sacrifice much, perhaps his personal happiness, his ideal partner. He didn’t want to settle for anything less. Well, then... Someone’s got to get a short end of the stick. It so happened that it fell upon him. Life’s tough.
He picked himself up and joined a stock trading group, and now put all his determination in learning the secret of the trading game.
It took him long and hard six years to climb back. Six years of constant work and learning, disappointments, and additional losses. For hours, days, months he sat and looked at the confusion of schedules, prices, volumes of purchases and sales, all kinds of technical characteristics, listened to experts, and followed on paper their advice. A partial understanding of what happened sometimes momentarily lit his brain, but as a slippery fish, he jumped out of his hands. He swam and swam, diving under obstacles, as he did under the guard rope while swimming in the pool, intensely and without stopping.
Discoveries love prepared minds. Robert knew about this mantra and was preparing his mind for discovery. And when it finally came, suddenly, in a flash of lightning, he clung to that insight and never let it go.
It came after he accidentally watched a video dedicated to Mandelbrot's fractals - a beautiful design, repeating both in the direction of infinitely small and infinitely large.
Like fractal patter in nature, waves of different frequency and amplitude, overlapping each other, formed a fractal pattern of market prices and volumes. As fractals repeated at different levels of magnification in Mandelbrot design, a graph of market fluctuations repeated in history. The most interesting and beautiful was not even that. Fractal repeats of prices and volumes were the expression of some general law; the political, economic, and cultural events that caused the ups and downs of stock stocks were also subject to this universal movement of fractals. It was as if Robert has discovered the divine design itself in all its beautiful complexity.
Fascinated by this, Robert sat by the computer for hours, predicting the rise and fall of prices, and in some cases even anticipating future political or economic events. Robert didn’t know the nature of these events but he could predict narrow periods when they would occur and how they would impact certain sections of the stock market.
Carefully applying this method, eventually, Robert returned his losses and now could swim without fear, carefully and thoughtfully, doing dolphin kick for the first fifteen yards, then having floated to the surface, was making long and confident strides that propelled him in the clean water forward.
It was only now that he finally was able to afford to start searching for his ideal second half and there could be no doubt that Robert would treat this search with as much perseverance, ingenuity, and devotion as he treated any of his projects. He thought that his chances to meet that one perfectly compatible person among the billions of women on the planet Earth was descent. Her existence was part of the same divine design disclosed by Mandelbrot's equation, simple and at the same time infinitely complex.